Grindhouse Fest: Love Camp 7 (1969)

-Grindhouse Fest is the special section in Celluloid Dimension where you can discover all the goodies from the golden age of exploitation cinema. Have fun!

Love Camp 7 (1969) Directed by Lee Frost

A momentous event, this notorious Video Nasty officialized the inception of a Grindhouse phenomenon: Nazisploitation and women-in-prison movies. Lee Frost’s ultra sleazy Love Camp 7 was the first responsible for turning Nazi iconography into a fetish – Luchino Visconti’s The Damned was released the same year as Frost’s film, however, this one was released earlier, hence the ignoble title goes to Love Camp 7 – and the very first to exploit Nazi depravity as an instrument of torture porn storytelling.

In a pseudo-dramatic frame of mind, Love Camp 7 initiates an equally far-fetched yarn about two American female officers, Lieutenant Linda Harman (Maria Lease) and Lieutenant Grace Freeman (Kathy Williams), both of whom volunteer for a dangerous mission. They must infiltrate a Nazi concentration camp to contact one of the Jewish prisoners there who holds essential military information. What they don’t realize is that this Nazi camp is a brothel that functions to satisfy the sexual pleasures of the Nazi high command, and it’s not just any bordello…it’s a very squalid one with a sadomasochistic orientation. The two American lieutenants must endure all kinds of sexist humiliations for the sake of the mission. As the first full-fledged Nazi exploitation film – and the one that laid down all the genre’s narrative patterns – Lee Frost’s crass direction doesn’t quite push the boundaries of indecency as future films of the genre would proudly do, but this is still super-duper sleazy filmmaking.

In Love Camp 7 they don’t have sex, they don’t fuck or screw, they make love; at least that’s how all the characters refer to coitus. And with that self-contradictory philosophy of love, this Video Nasty comprises an incongruous farrago of pornography; namely, horny Nazi officers abusing helpless female prisoners over and over again. It’s complete hogwash. But there’s something gleefully erotic about Lee Frost’s tawdry vision that is twistedly comical – perhaps this is an unintended result – and with its caricature of evil and decadence, Love Camp 7 crafts pop art in the most unethical and outrageous fashion to the extent that it can be classified as a brutish piece of questionable entertainment.

An intellectual would surely swap my description of “caricature of evil” for “banality of evil,” be that as it may, this trashy film bears that conception, it’s simply impossible to lie before Love Camp 7 and claim that the overt political incorrectness of Lee Frost’s filmmaking isn’t all that striking, because it is from ironic and contextually exploitative angles. When the preposterous plot – which is just an excuse to throw in sex scenes at every turn – drags on and becomes monotonous, Bob Cresse’s loutishly farcical performance as the sociopathic Nazi camp Kommandant pops up to capture your indignant attention – a hammy character and one of the best satirical renditions of the ruthlessness embedded in the Nazi psyche.

Giddily shot by Lee Frost and patently parsimonious, technically Love Camp 7 is not a good film; it is too far-fetched and wonky in its narratological construction to be so. However, there are sections that have magnetic perversity, notably when the Kommandant’s cruelty displays his inhumanity in all its infamous grandeur, the film strikes in a simultaneous way, horror and hilarity. A guilty pleasure I’m not too proud of.